Shopping malls include diverse shops and facilities; accordingly, a shopping mall may be equipped with guidance information providing apparatuses to direct users to their intended shops or facilities.
Such a guidance information providing apparatus refers to the layout information of the facilities based on the purpose of the visit and the personal attribute of a user, determines the place (an example of commercial information) where to direct the user, and provides guidance information on the place (an example of response information) to the user (refer to Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2014-178170).
E-commerce sites where users buy merchandises also provide guidance information to users. In response to a user operation of putting some item into a cart on a terminal device like a cell phone, the server of the E-commerce site may provide guidance information (an example of recommendation information) on the screen of the terminal device, informing the user of other items purchased by other users together with the item in the cart or other items of the same type as the item in the cart.
Furthermore, there exists a known recommendation sales method for diversified commodities. The method uses recommendation message data about the diversified commodities created by recommenders as guidance information to direct the user to find commodities matching the user's personal preference (refer to Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2003-157375).
Still further, there exists a known technique that associates and displays information on the user's purchase records in the past, which is not guidance information though, to provide useful information for the user to do shopping (refer to Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2004-535015).